education's digital futurehttp://edf.stanford.edu
enThe Machines Are Taking Overhttp://edf.stanford.edu/readings/machines-are-taking-over
<div class="field field-name-field-news-source field-type-link-field field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/magazine/how-computerized-tutors-are-learning-to-teach-humans.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-article-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2012-09-14T00:00:00-07:00">09/14/2012</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>By ANNIE MURPHY PAUL</p>
<p>Neil Heffernan was listening to his fiancée, Cristina Lindquist, tutor one of her students in mathematics when he had an idea. Heffernan was a graduate student in computer science, and by this point — the summer of 1997 — he had been working for two years with researchers at Carnegie Mellon University on developing computer software to help students improve their skills. But he had come to believe that the programs did little to assist their users. They were built on elaborate theories of the student mind — attempts to simulate the learning brain. Then it dawned on him: what was missing from the programs was the interventions teachers made to promote and accelerate learning. Why not model a computer program on a human tutor like Lindquist?</p>
<p>Over the next few months, Heffernan videotaped Lindquist, who taught math to middle-school students, as she tutored, transcribing the sessions word for word, hoping to isolate what made her a successful teacher. A look at the transcripts suggests the difficulties he faced. Lindquist’s tutoring sessions were highly interactive: a single hour might contain more than 400 lines of dialogue. She asked lots of questions and probed her student’s answers. She came up with examples based on the student’s own experiences. She began sentences, and her student completed them. Their dialogue was anything but formulaic.</p>
<p>Lindquist: Do you know how to calculate average driving speed?</p>
<p>Student: I think so, but I forget.</p>
<p>Lindquist: Well, average speed — as your mom drove you here, did she drive the same speed the whole time?</p>
<p>Student: No.</p>
<p>Lindquist: But she did have an average speed. How do you think you calculate the average speed?</p>
<p>Student: It would be hours divided by 55 miles.</p>
<p>Lindquist: Which way is it? It’s miles per hour. So which way do you divide?</p>
<p>Student: It would be 55 miles divided by hours.</p>
<p>As the session continued, Lindquist gestured, pointed, made eye contact, modulated her voice. “Cruising!” she exclaimed, after the student answered three questions in a row correctly. “Did you see how I had to stop and think?” she inquired, modeling how to solve a problem. “I can see you’re getting tired,” she commented sympathetically near the end of the session. How could a computer program ever approximate this?</p>
<p><strong>In a 1984 paper</strong> that is regarded as a classic of educational psychology, Benjamin Bloom, a professor at the University of Chicago, showed that being tutored is the most effective way to learn, vastly superior to being taught in a classroom. The experiments headed by Bloom randomly assigned fourth-, fifth- and eighth-grade students to classes of about 30 pupils per teacher, or to one-on-one tutoring. Children tutored individually performed two standard deviations better than children who received conventional classroom instruction — a huge difference.</p>
<p>Affluent American parents have since come to see the disparity Bloom identified as a golden opportunity, and tutoring has ballooned into a $5 billion industry. Among middle- and high-school students enrolled in New York City’s elite schools, tutoring is a common practice, and the most sought-after tutors can charge as much as $400 an hour.</p>
<p>But what of the pupils who could most benefit from tutoring — poor, urban, minority? Bloom had hoped that traditional teaching could eventually be made as effective as tutoring. But Heffernan was doubtful. He knew firsthand what it was like to grapple with the challenges of the classroom. After graduating from Amherst College, he joined Teach for America and was placed in an inner-city middle school in Baltimore. Some of his classes had as many as 40 students, all of them performing well below grade level. Discipline was a constant problem. Heffernan claims he set a school record for the number of students sent to the principal’s office. “I could barely control the class, let alone help each student,” Heffernan told me. “I wasn’t ever going to make a dent in this country’s educational problems by teaching just a few classes of students at a time.”</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source field-type-link-field field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/magazine/how-computerized-tutors-are-learning-to-teach-humans.html" target="_blank">Click here to read full article which is originally posted on The New York Times</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-reading-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><h3 class="field-label">Tags: </h3><ul class="links inline"><li class="taxonomy-term-reference-0"><a href="/readings/machine-learning" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">machine learning</a></li><li class="taxonomy-term-reference-1"><a href="/readings/k12" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">K12</a></li></ul></div>Wed, 19 Sep 2012 15:39:20 +0000piperadmin95 at http://edf.stanford.eduhttp://edf.stanford.edu/readings/machines-are-taking-over#commentsHow Luther went viralhttp://edf.stanford.edu/readings/how-luther-went-viral
<div class="field field-name-field-article-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2011-12-17T00:00:00-08:00">12/17/2011</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p><strong>Five centuries before Facebook and the Arab spring, social media helped bring about the Reformation</strong></p>
<p>IT IS a familiar-sounding tale: after decades of simmering discontent a new form of media gives opponents of an authoritarian regime a way to express their views, register their solidarity and co-ordinate their actions. The protesters' message spreads virally through social networks, making it impossible to suppress and highlighting the extent of public support for revolution. The combination of improved publishing technology and social networks is a catalyst for social change where previous efforts had failed.</p>
<p>That's what happened in the Arab spring. It's also what happened during the Reformation, nearly 500 years ago, when Martin Luther and his allies took the new media of their day—pamphlets, ballads and woodcuts—and circulated them through social networks to promote their message of religious reform.</p>
<p>Scholars have long debated the relative importance of printed media, oral transmission and images in rallying popular support for the Reformation. Some have championed the central role of printing, a relatively new technology at the time. Opponents of this view emphasise the importance of preaching and other forms of oral transmission. More recently historians have highlighted the role of media as a means of social signalling and co-ordinating public opinion in the Reformation.</p>
<p>Now the internet offers a new perspective on this long-running debate, namely that the important factor was not the printing press itself (which had been around since the 1450s), but the wider system of media sharing along social networks—what is called “social media” today. Luther, like the Arab revolutionaries, grasped the dynamics of this new media environment very quickly, and saw how it could spread his message.</p>
<p><strong>New post from Martin Luther</strong></p>
<p>The start of the Reformation is usually dated to Luther's nailing of his “95 Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences” to the church door in Wittenberg on October 31st 1517. The “95 Theses” were propositions written in Latin that he wished to discuss, in the academic custom of the day, in an open debate at the university. Luther, then an obscure theologian and minister, was outraged by the behaviour of Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar who was selling indulgences to raise money to fund the pet project of his boss, Pope Leo X: the reconstruction of St Peter's Basilica in Rome. Hand over your money, went Tetzel's sales pitch, and you can ensure that your dead relatives are not stuck in purgatory. This crude commercialisation of the doctrine of indulgences, encapsulated in Tetzel's slogan—“As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, so the soul from purgatory springs”—was, to Luther, “the pious defrauding of the faithful” and a glaring symptom of the need for broad reform. Pinning a list of propositions to the church door, which doubled as the university notice board, was a standard way to announce a public debate.</p>
<p>Although they were written in Latin, the “95 Theses” caused an immediate stir, first within academic circles in Wittenberg and then farther afield. In December 1517 printed editions of the theses, in the form of pamphlets and broadsheets, appeared simultaneously in Leipzig, Nuremberg and Basel, paid for by Luther's friends to whom he had sent copies. German translations, which could be read by a wider public than Latin-speaking academics and clergy, soon followed and quickly spread throughout the German-speaking lands. Luther's friend Friedrich Myconius later wrote that “hardly 14 days had passed when these propositions were known throughout Germany and within four weeks almost all of Christendom was familiar with them.”</p>
<p>The unintentional but rapid spread of the “95 Theses” alerted Luther to the way in which media passed from one person to another could quickly reach a wide audience. “They are printed and circulated far beyond my expectation,” he wrote in March 1518 to a publisher in Nuremberg who had published a German translation of the theses. But writing in scholarly Latin and then translating it into German was not the best way to address the wider public. Luther wrote that he “should have spoken far differently and more distinctly had I known what was going to happen.” For the publication later that month of his “Sermon on Indulgences and Grace”, he switched to German, avoiding regional vocabulary to ensure that his words were intelligible from the Rhineland to Saxony. The pamphlet, an instant hit, is regarded by many as the true starting point of the Reformation.</p>
<p>The media environment that Luther had shown himself so adept at managing had much in common with today's online ecosystem of blogs, social networks and discussion threads. It was a decentralised system whose participants took care of distribution, deciding collectively which messages to amplify through sharing and recommendation. Modern media theorists refer to participants in such systems as a “networked public”, rather than an “audience”, since they do more than just consume information. Luther would pass the text of a new pamphlet to a friendly printer (no money changed hands) and then wait for it to ripple through the network of printing centres across Germany.</p>
<p>Unlike larger books, which took weeks or months to produce, a pamphlet could be printed in a day or two. Copies of the initial edition, which cost about the same as a chicken, would first spread throughout the town where it was printed. Luther's sympathisers recommended it to their friends. Booksellers promoted it and itinerant colporteurs hawked it. Travelling merchants, traders and preachers would then carry copies to other towns, and if they sparked sufficient interest, local printers would quickly produce their own editions, in batches of 1,000 or so, in the hope of cashing in on the buzz. A popular pamphlet would thus spread quickly without its author's involvement.</p>
<p>As with “Likes” and retweets today, the number of reprints serves as an indicator of a given item's popularity. Luther's pamphlets were the most sought after; a contemporary remarked that they “were not so much sold as seized”. His first pamphlet written in German, the “Sermon on Indulgences and Grace”, was reprinted 14 times in 1518 alone, in print runs of at least 1,000 copies each time. Of the 6,000 different pamphlets that were published in German-speaking lands between 1520 and 1526, some 1,700 were editions of a few dozen works by Luther. In all, some 6m-7m pamphlets were printed in the first decade of the Reformation, more than a quarter of them Luther's.</p>
<p>Although Luther was the most prolific and popular author, there were many others on both sides of the debate. Tetzel, the indulgence-seller, was one of the first to respond to him in print, firing back with his own collection of theses. Others embraced the new pamphlet format to weigh in on the merits of Luther's arguments, both for and against, like argumentative bloggers. Sylvester Mazzolini defended the pope against Luther in his “Dialogue Against the Presumptuous Theses of Martin Luther”. He called Luther “a leper with a brain of brass and a nose of iron” and dismissed his arguments on the basis of papal infallibility. Luther, who refused to let any challenge go unanswered, took a mere two days to produce his own pamphlet in response, giving as good as he got. “I am sorry now that I despised Tetzel,” he wrote. “Ridiculous as he was, he was more acute than you. You cite no scripture. You give no reasons.”</p>
<p>Being able to follow and discuss such back-and-forth exchanges of views, in which each author quoted his opponent's words in order to dispute them, gave people a thrilling and unprecedented sense of participation in a vast, distributed debate. Arguments in their own social circles about the merits of Luther's views could be seen as part of a far wider discourse, both spoken and printed. Many pamphlets called upon the reader to discuss their contents with others and read them aloud to the illiterate. People read and discussed pamphlets at home with their families, in groups with their friends, and in inns and taverns. Luther's pamphlets were read out at spinning bees in Saxony and in bakeries in Tyrol. In some cases entire guilds of weavers or leather-workers in particular towns declared themselves supporters of the Reformation, indicating that Luther's ideas were being propagated in the workplace. One observer remarked in 1523 that better sermons could be heard in the inns of Ulm than in its churches, and in Basel in 1524 there were complaints about people preaching from books and pamphlets in the town's taverns. Contributors to the debate ranged from the English king Henry VIII, whose treatise attacking Luther (co-written with Thomas More) earned him the title “Defender of the Faith” from the pope, to Hans Sachs, a shoemaker from Nuremberg who wrote a series of hugely popular songs in support of Luther.</p>
<p><strong>A multimedia campaign</strong></p>
<p>It was not just words that travelled along the social networks of the Reformation era, but music and images too. The news ballad, like the pamphlet, was a relatively new form of media. It set a poetic and often exaggerated description of contemporary events to a familiar tune so that it could be easily learned, sung and taught to others. News ballads were often “contrafacta” that deliberately mashed up a pious melody with secular or even profane lyrics. They were distributed in the form of printed lyric sheets, with a note to indicate which tune they should be sung to. Once learned they could spread even among the illiterate through the practice of communal singing.</p>
<p>Both reformers and Catholics used this new form to spread information and attack their enemies. “We are Starting to Sing a New Song”, Luther's first venture into the news-ballad genre, told the story of two monks who had been executed in Brussels in 1523 after refusing to recant their Lutheran beliefs. Luther's enemies denounced him as the Antichrist in song, while his supporters did the same for the pope and insulted Catholic theologians (“Goat, desist with your bleating”, one of them was admonished). Luther himself is thought to have been the author of “Now We Drive Out the Pope”, a parody of a folk song called “Now We Drive Out Winter”, whose tune it borrowed:</p>
<ul><li>Now we drive out the pope
</li><li>from Christ's church and God's house.
</li><li>Therein he has reigned in a deadly fashion
</li><li>and has seduced uncountably many souls.
</li><li>Now move along, you damned son,
</li><li>you Whore of Babylon. You are the abomination and the Antichrist,<br />
full of lies, death and cunning.
</li></ul><p>Woodcuts were another form of propaganda. The combination of bold graphics with a smattering of text, printed as a broadsheet, could convey messages to the illiterate or semi-literate and serve as a visual aid for preachers. Luther remarked that “without images we can neither think nor understand anything.” Some religious woodcuts were elaborate, with complex allusions and layers of meaning that would only have been apparent to the well-educated. “Passional Christi und Antichristi”, for example, was a series of images contrasting the piety of Christ with the decadence and corruption of the pope. Some were astonishingly crude and graphic, such as “The Origin of the Monks” (see picture), showing three devils excreting a pile of monks. The best of them were produced by Luther's friend Lucas Cranach. Luther's opponents responded with woodcuts of their own: “Luther's Game of Heresy” (see beginning of this article) depicts him boiling up a stew with the help of three devils, producing fumes from the pot labelled falsehood, pride, envy, heresy and so forth.</p>
<p>Amid the barrage of pamphlets, ballads and woodcuts, public opinion was clearly moving in Luther's favour. “Idle chatter and inappropriate books” were corrupting the people, fretted one bishop. “Daily there is a veritable downpour of Lutheran tracts in German and Latin…nothing is sold here except the tracts of Luther,” lamented Aleander, Leo X's envoy to Germany, in 1521. Most of the 60 or so clerics who rallied to the pope's defence did so in academic and impenetrable Latin, the traditional language of theology, rather than in German. Where Luther's works spread like wildfire, their pamphlets fizzled. Attempts at censorship failed, too. Printers in Leipzig were banned from publishing or selling anything by Luther or his allies, but material printed elsewhere still flowed into the city. The city council complained to the Duke of Saxony that printers faced losing “house, home, and all their livelihood” because “that which one would gladly sell, and for which there is demand, they are not allowed to have or sell.” What they had was lots of Catholic pamphlets, “but what they have in over-abundance is desired by no one and cannot even be given away.”</p>
<p>Luther's enemies likened the spread of his ideas to a sickness. The papal bull threatening Luther with excommunication in 1520 said its aim was “to cut off the advance of this plague and cancerous disease so it will not spread any further”. The Edict of Worms in 1521 warned that the spread of Luther's message had to be prevented, otherwise “the whole German nation, and later all other nations, will be infected by this same disorder.” But it was too late—the infection had taken hold in Germany and beyond. To use the modern idiom, Luther's message had gone viral.</p>
<p><strong>From Wittenberg to Facebook</strong></p>
<p>In the early years of the Reformation expressing support for Luther's views, through preaching, recommending a pamphlet or singing a news ballad directed at the pope, was dangerous. By stamping out isolated outbreaks of opposition swiftly, autocratic regimes discourage their opponents from speaking out and linking up. A collective-action problem thus arises when people are dissatisfied, but are unsure how widely their dissatisfaction is shared, as Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, has observed in connection with the Arab spring. The dictatorships in Egypt and Tunisia, she argues, survived for as long as they did because although many people deeply disliked those regimes, they could not be sure others felt the same way. Amid the outbreaks of unrest in early 2011, however, social-media websites enabled lots of people to signal their preferences en masse to their peers very quickly, in an “informational cascade” that created momentum for further action.</p>
<p>The same thing happened in the Reformation. The surge in the popularity of pamphlets in 1523-24, the vast majority of them in favour of reform, served as a collective signalling mechanism. As Andrew Pettegree, an expert on the Reformation at St Andrew's University, puts it in “Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion”, “It was the superabundance, the cascade of titles, that created the impression of an overwhelming tide, an unstoppable movement of opinion…Pamphlets and their purchasers had together created the impression of irresistible force.” Although Luther had been declared a heretic in 1521, and owning or reading his works was banned by the church, the extent of local political and popular support for Luther meant he escaped execution and the Reformation became established in much of Germany.</p>
<p>Modern society tends to regard itself as somehow better than previous ones, and technological advance reinforces that sense of superiority. But history teaches us that there is nothing new under the sun. Robert Darnton, an historian at Harvard University, who has studied information-sharing networks in pre-revolutionary France, argues that “the marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past—even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the internet.” Social media are not unprecedented: rather, they are the continuation of a long tradition. Modern digital networks may be able to do it more quickly, but even 500 years ago the sharing of media could play a supporting role in precipitating a revolution. Today's social-media systems do not just connect us to each other: they also link us to the past.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source field-type-link-field field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="http://www.economist.com/node/21541719" target="_blank">The article original posted on The Economist</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-reading-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><h3 class="field-label">Tags: </h3><ul class="links inline"><li class="taxonomy-term-reference-0"><a href="/readings/social-networks" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Social networks</a></li></ul></div>Wed, 19 Sep 2012 04:16:21 +0000piperadmin92 at http://edf.stanford.eduhttp://edf.stanford.edu/readings/how-luther-went-viral#commentsStanford for Allhttp://edf.stanford.edu/readings/stanford-all
<div class="field field-name-field-article-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2012-09-17T00:00:00-07:00">09/17/2012</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="og:image rdfs:seeAlso" resource="http://edf.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/IMG.jpg?itok=Lhl53kp2"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://edf.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/IMG.jpg?itok=Lhl53kp2" width="225" height="292" alt="Heads of State" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>Online technologies are shaking up the Farm's classrooms—and the University's worldview. Higher education may never be the same.</p>
<p>By Theresa Johnston</p>
<p>Christos Porios is a 16-year-old high school student who lives in Alexandropoulos, Greece. He has never seen the Stanford campus: never gazed up Palm Drive on a September morning, walked around the Quad or pedaled across White Plaza. He has no real ties to the University. Yet he credits a Stanford course with changing his life.</p>
<p>Porios was among an astonishing 100,000 people who signed up last fall for an experimental online course on applied machine learning, the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed. Computer science professor Andrew Ng designed the course for Stanford students, but at the last minute he decided to make his digitally recorded lectures, exams and programming assignments available online to anyone, free of charge.</p>
<p>Porios learned of the course via Twitter. He received no Stanford credit for completing it, just a congratulatory letter. Nevertheless he was floored by his experience. "Andrew Ng is truly one of the best teachers I ever had, even though I've never met him," he later wrote. "I want to thank him from the depths of my heart for offering these amazing learning opportunities."</p>
<p>Stanford has come a long way since founders Leland and Jane vowed to make the children of California their own. But should worldwide online education now be a part of Stanford's mission—and bright students like Porios part of the family? Should Stanford encourage more of its faculty to produce these so-called massive open online courses, or MOOCs? Should anyone profit from their distribution? And if the University does invest more heavily in online education, how might that affect students—and professors—on the home campus?</p>
<p>During the past year such questions have been the subject of intense debate. Many professors say they like the idea of mass online education for humanitarian reasons. Some believe high-quality online courses could enhance the University's prestige in the same way that faculty-authored textbooks do, and help Stanford attract and identify brilliant students from around the world. And some would be happy to replace their large lecture courses with a more engaging educational model—one that many plugged-in Stanford students prefer.</p>
<p>Other professors loathe the idea of lecturing to a camera, or of trying to assess thousands of students online. They fear that time spent developing online courses might distract from their on-campus responsibilities. And they worry about the fallout. Will less well-known colleges and universities find that people won't pay to enroll there when they can get a more prestigious "brand" online for free?</p>
<p>Speaking before the Faculty Senate last January, President John Hennessy acknowledged that the issue of online education raises more questions than answers. Still, he urged his colleagues to keep open minds—and, above all, to keep experimenting. "It may be the case that we can build online technologies sufficiently compelling that they give the University another way to scale up that's virtual rather than physical," he said, referring to the shelved StanfordNYC initiative, a science and engineering campus Stanford had hoped to build on Manhattan's Roosevelt Island.</p>
<p>Hennessy refined his thinking during a winter/spring quarter sabbatical. "First and foremost, I hope Stanford will broadly deploy online technology to improve the education we deliver for our existing students," he said in an email interview. (<a href="http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=56003">See sidebar</a>.) "Beyond the campus bounds, we already provide some forms of online education, primarily at the graduate level. Expanding such opportunities, while maintaining a high quality experience where students can learn and demonstrate mastery of topics, is in keeping with the University's mission, and something we can aspire to in the next few years.</p>
<p>"How things will evolve ten years out is hard to say," he added. "Education changes slowly in our society while technology changes quickly. Nonetheless, change is coming. And for some parts of higher education, I expect it to be profound."</p>
<p>Stanford's experience with distance learning goes back to the late 1960s, when the Stanford Center for Professional Development began piping engineering classes to Silicon Valley employers via closed-circuit television. Thirty years later, the Stanford School of Engineering became the first in the world to deliver a master's degree solely through online technologies. More than 100,000 K-12 students have taken individual online courses through Stanford's Education Program for Gifted Youth, and in 2006 the EPGY online high school opened, initially offering a three-year diploma and more recently expanding to serve grades 7 through 9. All these programs are selective and charge tuition, but Stanford also was a pioneer in uploading free recorded lectures and courses to YouTube and iTunes U.</p>
<p>The latest round of online experimentation, initially for on-campus consumption, began about three years ago when Stanford computer scientists started toying with the idea of "flipping" their classes—that is, putting their lectures and course materials online in order to free up class time for more engaging activities, such as optional group problem-solving exercises and guest lectures by Silicon Valley luminaries.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source field-type-link-field field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=55991" target="_blank">The article original posted on Stanford Magazine. Click here for complete article.</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-reading-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><h3 class="field-label">Tags: </h3><ul class="links inline"><li class="taxonomy-term-reference-0"><a href="/readings/moocs" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">MOOCs</a></li></ul></div>Mon, 17 Sep 2012 15:49:50 +0000piperadmin89 at http://edf.stanford.eduhttp://edf.stanford.edu/readings/stanford-all#commentsNew platform for online courses stresses team-based, experiential learninghttp://edf.stanford.edu/readings/new-platform-online-courses-stresses-team-based-experiential-learning
<div class="field field-name-field-article-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2012-09-17T00:00:00-07:00">09/17/2012</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>A new online course on a new online platform at Stanford succeeds not only in joining people from dozens of countries but enabling them to directly collaborate on group projects: A group of women in Iran put together a tourism project; three men in India devised a way of connecting Indian musicians, audiences and venues; a pair of men in Trinidad and Tobago figured out how to ease road transportation; a team with members in Germany, the United Kingdom and Russia developed a mobile app for buying and selling locally designed products; and four Americans and a Pakistani created a search engine to find online classes.</p>
<p>Clearly, some projects will prosper and others will not, though in either case the experience will have taught team members invaluable lessons.</p>
<p>The class, taught by Chuck Eesley, assistant professor of management science and engineering, is called <em><a href="http://venture-lab.stanford.edu/venture">Technology Entrepreneurship</a></em>.</p>
<p>Over the summer, the class hosted an unusual visitor: Stanford President John Hennessy. Amin Saberi, associate professor of management science and engineering who developed the platform, called Venture Lab, spent 20 minutes chatting with Hennessy and asking him questions submitted by students. They talked about technology, entrepreneurship, what a university president does all day (lots) and the future of online learning.</p>
<div style="float:right;width:200px;background:#f6f3e5;margin:0 0 10px 10px"><img alt="Chuck Eesley" src="http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/september/images/eesley_news.jpg" width="200" /> Chuck Eesley</div>
<p>"We're doing experiments to see what works for students, what works long term for the university," Hennessy said in a <a href="http://eesley.blogspot.com/2012/08/venture-labs-interview-with-john.html">videotaped interview</a> on the Venture Lab website. "I think it'll shift over time, what kinds of things people are willing to do, what kinds of recognition students might receive, how eventually there might be a cost model. We're in that period where we try lots of things, we experiment with different ways of doing things."</p>
<p>Experimenting is exactly what got Eesley and Saberi into the business of teaching the massive open online course (MOOC) in technology entrepreneurship, and it appears to have been a resounding success. It is being repeated this fall.</p>
<p>Eesley, who teaches and conducts research on entrepreneurship, began flipping his classroom, that is, putting his lectures on video and dedicating class time to more interactive, hands-on activities, and students seemed to like it.</p>
<p>"I wanted to have a greater impact with my teaching, and I saw what was happening in the Computer Science Department" with the development of MOOC technologies, Eesley said. "But I wasn't sure how to do it, and then Amin came to me."</p>
<p>Saberi pointed out to Eesley that his class relied on teams that no existing MOOC platform could accommodate.</p>
<p>"Amin said, 'We can help them form teams and work on their projects, just like in your Stanford class. Let me try to build a platform for you.' How could I turn that down?" Eesley asked.</p>
<p>Through social media, Eesley heard from some 80,000 people who said they'd be interested in taking an online course. "We said, 'Thanks for your interest, we'll get back to you,' and then we designed the platform," Saberi recalled. His doctoral student Farnaz Ronaghi put it together and led a team of students working on the project. "Launch and learn," Saberi called it.</p>
<div style="float:left;width:200px;background:#f6f3e5;margin:0 10px 10px 0"><img alt="Amin Saberi" src="http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/september/images/saberi_news.jpg" width="200" /><br /> Amin Saberi</div>
<h3><strong>Experiential learning</strong></h3>
<p>The platform, called Venture Lab, is distinctive precisely because it is designed for collaboration in the classroom. Other MOOC platforms are predicated on individuals doing work on their own. Students communicate with peers on forum pages, but the unit of analysis is singular. Venture Lab aims to make online learning usable and advantageous for classes that rely on groups working together.</p>
<p>"The most important part of this platform is that students can learn from their peers," Saberi said. "The social and experiential aspects of learning must not be diminished by going online; on the contrary, the challenge is how to <em>amplify</em> them online."</p>
<p>This fall, Stanford will offer five online <a href="http://online.stanford.edu/courses/">Venture Lab classes</a>.</p>
<p>The mechanics of team formation, Eesley noted in an understatement, is "not a trivial coding exercise." It's a massive undertaking in its own right. The 37,000 students (from 150 countries) initially enrolled in his course offered some information about themselves: their country, language, background, skills, etc. Using that information, Saberi created an algorithm to form teams of 8 to 10 members.</p>
<p>Then all students had to do a warm-up exercise in which they identified the five worst and five best startup ideas they could think of. Eesley confessed stealing the exercise from his colleague Tina Seelig, executive director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, who teaches courses on creativity and entrepreneurship at Stanford's <a href="http://dschool.stanford.edu/">d.school</a>. Students used the information gleaned from that exercise to reshuffle themselves.</p>
<p>"Amin would always want to do the optimal engineering solution, and I'd say, 'What about just doing it a stupid way?'" Eesley recalled. "We would disagree on what's really cool. It took us a long time to figure out how to form teams." But finally, after some three weeks of this give-and-take, class was ready to start.</p>
<div style="float:right;width:200px;background:#f6f3e5;margin:0 0 10px 10px"><img alt="Farnaz Ronaghi " src="http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/september/images/ronaghi_news.jpg" width="200" /><br /> Farnaz Ronaghi
</div>
<p>Each week there were video lectures and exercises, and teams quickly decided on their projects. They developed marketing and business plans, made presentations, created prototypes. Some had official mentors (of whom there were around 200) who signed up with the course to lend a hand.</p>
<p>Each time a team submitted an assignment, everyone could evaluate each other's contribution. This enabled good students, identified by five stars next to their name, to find each other, and it also made students feel accountable to each other, Saberi said. "At the end of the class, students said the most rewarding part of the course was the people they met, learning to negotiate and build something together." Their projects covered a wide range of interests: telecommunications, mobile devices, medicine and health, energy, architecture, transportation, education and finance.</p>
<h3><strong>'Crash Course on Creativity'</strong></h3>
<p>Seelig said she knew the minute she learned about Saberi's platform that her Stanford class on creativity could be hosted nowhere else.</p>
<p>Her eight-week online class begins Oct. 17 and is called <em><a href="http://venture-lab.stanford.edu/creativity">A Crash Course on Creativity</a></em>. She will start by having all students watch the <a href="http://tedx.stanford.edu/speakers/tina-seelig/">talk</a> she gave at TEDxStanford last May and then write a 500-word essay on it. The essays will be shared, to enable students to learn more about each other and choose teammates.</p>
<p>Each week, teams will watch a short video, do a bit of reading from Seelig's own book, <em>inGenius: A Crash Course on Creativity</em>, and complete an assignment, the best of which will be posted on the home page. Teams will communicate via Skype or other existing Internet tools, and on Fridays she will host a Google Hangout to discuss the weekly project with students – with thousands listening in (and Tweeting their questions).</p>
<p>"The Venture Lab platform is very interesting for experiential classes with an unlimited number of students," she said. "The question is, what can we do with this platform that we can't do in a traditional classroom? For example, if we do an assignment on observation, then people in India or the United States or Latin America will be able to contribute very different insights based on their different environments."</p>
<h3><strong>New ideas, new products</strong></h3>
<p>The lively home page of Eesley's course in spring announced which teams and individuals (approximately 10,000 made it to the end) were most recently active, so students could keep track of each other.</p>
<div style="float:right;width:200px;background:#f6f3e5;margin:0 0 10px 10px"><img alt="Tina Seelig" src="http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/september/images/seelig_news.jpg" width="200" /><br /> Tina Seelig
</div>
<p>Among the teams whose members had the most stars by their names was Team Alice, led by a Bay Area woman with vast experience in health care research and business development. She wanted to develop a product aimed at women, though she wasn't quite sure what. On Venture Lab she acquired three teammates: a local anesthesiologist/entrepreneur and two computer scientists. They figured out a division of labor, splitting marketing and coding, and together they created BumpMD, a service for women and families with fertility problems.</p>
<p>Another of the more successful teams – coincidentally, also baby-focused – was TeleHealth, led by a couple of former Morgan Stanley employees in New York. They had already developed a portable wireless device to measure babies' vital signs and transfer that information to cell phones, presumably in the pocket or purse of a worried parent. The prototype had done well at competitions, but they wanted to make it a viable product. Enter Venture Lab, where the original members (along with new colleagues) saw their possibilities multiply. Originally they told Saberi's research assistant, Hamsa Sridhar, they had very strict ideas about which features to include, but through the class they learned to be more open and allow the product (now called Monbaby) to evolve.</p>
<h3><strong>Five classes this fall</strong></h3>
<p>Paul Kim, assistant dean and chief technology officer of the School of Education, also will be using the Venture Lab platform this fall. In his 10-week, project-based course, <em><a href="http://venture-lab.stanford.edu/education">Designing a New Learning Environment</a></em>, teams of students will design ways in which technology can be leveraged to provide better interactive learning scenarios in K-12 classrooms. Venture Lab will host two additional classes in fall, on <a href="http://venture-lab.stanford.edu/finance">finance</a> and <a href="http://venture-lab.stanford.edu/advanced_venture">advanced entrepreneurship</a>. All begin Oct. 15.</p>
<p>Eesley is teaching his class again, though while he prepares his tenure file he will rely on a co-instructor. Looking ahead, Eesley said, he'd like to do two things: more closely integrate his regular Stanford class with his MOOC and incorporate gaming and simulation technology.</p>
<p>"We could present situations online that would take students years to find in the real world," he said. "We could take them through the steps of planning an IPO, for example, and compress the time scale many times over. Prior experience is really important for entrepreneurs when they start out; virtual experience would be the next best thing. So I'm really excited about the gaming potential."</p>
<p>But the community that grew out of the Venture Lab teams is not only virtual. Eesley said someone opened up an Internet cafe in Ghana just to enable people to take his course; in Seattle, meanwhile, Sridhar heard that a few dozen participants from different teams regularly gathered at a local startup incubator to talk over their plans.</p>
<p>"The most rewarding part of this has been the emails I've gotten from around the world," Eesley said. "For what really was a marginal effort, I've magnified my impact on the world. In a traditional classroom, it would have taken me decades to reach that many students. That's why I became a professor: to teach people."</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source field-type-link-field field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/september/venture-lab-platform-091712.html" target="_blank">The article original posted on Stanford Report</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-reading-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><h3 class="field-label">Tags: </h3><ul class="links inline"><li class="taxonomy-term-reference-0"><a href="/readings/moocs" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">MOOCs</a></li><li class="taxonomy-term-reference-1"><a href="/readings/online-education" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Online education</a></li><li class="taxonomy-term-reference-2"><a href="/readings/online-classes" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Online Classes</a></li></ul></div>Mon, 17 Sep 2012 15:29:46 +0000piperadmin88 at http://edf.stanford.eduhttp://edf.stanford.edu/readings/new-platform-online-courses-stresses-team-based-experiential-learning#commentsThe Siege of Academehttp://edf.stanford.edu/readings/siege-academe
<div class="field field-name-field-article-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2012-09-17T00:00:00-07:00">09/17/2012</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p><em>For years, Silicon Valley has failed to breach the walls of higher education with disruptive technology. But the tide of battle is changing. A report from the front lines.</em></p>
<p>It’s three o’clock in the afternoon on Easter, and I’m standing on a wooden deck in the Corona Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, looking out toward Nob Hill. A man is cooking large slabs of meat on a gas grill as two dozen people mingle with glasses of bourbon and bottles of beer in the cool, damp breeze blowing in off the ocean. All of these people are would-be movers and shakers in American higher education—the historic, world-leading system that constitutes one of this country’s greatest economic assets—but not one of them is an academic. They’re all tech entrepreneurs. Or, as the local vernacular has it, hackers.</p>
<p>Some of them are the kinds of hackers a college dean could love: folks who have come up with ingenious but polite ways to make campus life work better. Standing over there by the case of Jim Beam, for instance, are the founders of OneSchool, a mobile app that helps students navigate college by offering campus maps, course schedules, phone directories, and the like in one interface. The founders are all computer science majors who dropped out of Penn State last semester. I ask the skinniest and geekiest among them how he joined the company. He was first recruited last spring, he says, when his National Merit Scholarship profile mentioned that he likes to design iPhone apps in his spare time. He’s nineteen years old.</p>
<p>But many of the people here are engaged in business pursuits far more revolutionary in their intentions. That preppy-looking guy near the barbecue? He’s launching a company called Degreed, which aims to upend the traditional monopoly that colleges and universities hold over the minting of professional credentials; he wants to use publicly available data like academic rank and grade inflation to standardize the comparative value of different college degrees, then allow people to add information about what they’ve learned outside of college to their baseline degree “score.” It’s the kind of idea that could end up fizzling out before anyone’s really heard of it, or could, just maybe, have huge consequences for the market in credentials. And that woman standing by the tree? She’s the recent graduate of Columbia University who works for a company called Kno, which is aiming to upset the $8 billion textbook industry with cheaper, better, electronic textbooks delivered through tablet computers. And then there’s the guy standing to her right wearing a black fleece zip-up jacket: five days ago, he announced the creation of the Minerva Project, the “first new elite American university in over a century.”</p>
<p>Last August, Marc Andreessen, the man whose Netscape Web browser ignited the original dot-com boom and who is now one of Silicon Valley’s most influential venture capitalists, wrote a much-discussed op-ed in the <em>Wall Street Journal</em>. His argument was that “software is eating the world.” At a time of low start-up costs and broadly distributed Internet access that allows for massive economies of scale, software has reached a tipping point that will allow it to disrupt industry after industry, in a dynamic epitomized by the recent collapse of Borders under the giant foot of Amazon. And the next industries up for wholesale transformation by software, Andreessen wrote, are health care and education. That, at least, is where he’s aiming his venture money. And where Andreessen goes, others follow. According to the National Venture Capital Association, investment in education technology companies increased from less than $100 million in 2007 to nearly $400 million last year. For the huge generator of innovation, technology, and wealth that is Silicon Valley, higher education is a particularly fat target right now.</p>
<p>This hype has happened before, of course. Back in the 1990s, when Andreessen made his first millions, many people confidently predicted that the Internet would render brick-and-mortar universities obsolete. It hasn’t happened yet, in part because colleges are a lot more complicated than retail bookstores. Higher education is a publicly subsidized, heavily regulated, culturally entrenched sector that has stubbornly resisted digital rationalization. But the defenders of the ivy-covered walls have never been more nervous about the Internet threat. In June, a panicked board of directors at the University of Virginia fired (and, after widespread outcry, rehired) their president, in part because they worried she was too slow to move Thomas Jefferson’s university into the digital world.</p>
<p>The ongoing carnage in the newspaper industry provides an object lesson of what can happen when a long-established, information-focused industry’s business model is challenged by low-price competitors online. The disruptive power of information technology may be our best hope for curing the chronic college cost disease that is driving a growing number of students into ruinous debt or out of higher education altogether. It may also be an existential threat to institutions that have long played a crucial role in American life.</p>
<p>I’m here at this party and in the Bay Area for the next few days to observe the habits, folkways, and codes of the barbarians at the gate—to see how close they’ve come toward finding business models and technologies that could wreak such havoc on higher education. My guide, and my host at this party—he organized the event for my benefit—is a man named Michael Staton. With sandy-blond hair, blue eyes, and a sunburned complexion, Michael is thirty-one—old by start-up standards—and recently married. He’s the president and “chief evangelist” of Inigral, a company he created five years ago to build college-branded social networks for incoming undergraduates. But just as importantly for my purposes, he’s also one of those people who has a knack for connecting with others, a high-link node in a growing network of education technology entrepreneurs who have set their sights on the mammoth higher education industry.</p>
<p>One of the bedrooms in the house where we’re mingling and drinking was Inigral’s headquarters for the first eight months of its existence, back when the founders were “bootstrapping” the company, which is valleyspeak for growing the business on their own using credit cards, waitering tips, plasma donation proceeds, and other sources that don’t involve the investment dollars that can shoot a start-up toward fame and fortune at the price of diluting the founder’s ownership and control. The longer someone can manage to feed themselves with ramen noodles and keep things going via bootstrapping, the more of their company they’ll ultimately get to keep—unless someone else comes up with the same idea, takes the venture capital (VC) money earlier, and uses it to blow them to smithereens. The start-up culture is full of such tough decisions about money, timing, and power, which are, in their own way, just as complicated and risky as the task of building new businesses that will delight the world and disrupt a trillion-dollar market.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source field-type-link-field field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2012/features/_its_three_oclock_in039373.php?page=1" target="_blank">The article original posted on <i>The Washington Monthly</i>. Click for complete article.</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-reading-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><h3 class="field-label">Tags: </h3><ul class="links inline"><li class="taxonomy-term-reference-0"><a href="/readings/higher-education" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Higher education</a></li></ul></div>Mon, 17 Sep 2012 15:25:10 +0000piperadmin87 at http://edf.stanford.eduhttp://edf.stanford.edu/readings/siege-academe#commentsGates, MOOCs and Remediationhttp://edf.stanford.edu/readings/gates-moocs-and-remediation
<div class="field field-name-field-article-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2012-09-14T00:00:00-07:00">09/14/2012</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>Early returns show that massive open online courses (MOOCs) work best for motivated and academically prepared students. But could high-quality MOOCs benefit a broader range of learners, like those who get tripped up by remedial classes?</p>
<p>That’s the question the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation wants to answer with a newly announced round of 10 grants for the creation of MOOCs for remedial coursework.</p>
<p>“We’re trying to seed the conversation and seed the experimentation,” said Josh Jarrett, the foundation's deputy director for education and postsecondary education.<br />
MOOCs tend to provoke strong feelings in the academy, and in the wake of Gates's announcement this week, some observers questioned whether free, widely available online courses could be tailored to students with remedial needs. But others, including experts on developmental learning, welcomed the attempt to tackle one of higher education’s most vexing problems.</p>
<p>“This has the potential for raising the quality of instruction in developmental education, if used properly,” said Hunter R. Boylan, director of the National Center for Developmental Education.</p>
<p>The foundation seeks applications for MOOCs with content that focuses on a “high-enrollment, low-success introductory level course that is a barrier to success for many students, particularly low-income, first-generation students.”</p>
<p>That's a tall order, said Amy Slaton, an associate professor of history at Drexel University. MOOCs are about economies of scale, she said, which are not compatible with the personalized support remedial students typically require to succeed. Doing high-touch teaching on the cheap "doesn't work in the real world," said Slaton, an expert on technical education and workforce issues. "When you spend more, more kids learn."</p>
<p>Slaton said the foundation's goals are well-intentioned, but that "they are buying into these very naïve ideas about how technology works in education."<br />
The winning entrants will be eligible for one-year grants of up to $50,000. Only nonprofit colleges in the U.S. can apply. But that's probably because of red tape that comes with charitable giving to corporations or foreign colleges.</p>
<p>Applicants also must work with an established MOOC platform that has previously hosted courses taken by at least tens of thousands of students, according to the announcement. Candidates might include several for-profit ventures, like the high-profile Coursera and Udacity MOOC providers, as well as MOOC-ready platforms offered by Blackboard and Kaplan Higher Education.</p>
<p>The reason Gates is requiring the use of a proven platform, Jarrett said, is that designing a MOOC is only half the battle. For the courses to work, colleges must “get people to come and engage” – lots of people.</p>
<p>MOOCs are just a tool, Jarrett said. And several components of higher education, including remediation, could possibly be “MOOCified,” he said. The foundation hopes to do that through experimenting and learning with introductory courses. And Jarrett said he doesn’t expect quick answers.<br />
“The jury will be out on MOOCs for at least a couple years,” he said.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source field-type-link-field field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/09/14/gates-foundation-solicits-remedial-moocs" target="_blank">Click here to read full article which is originally posted on Inside Higher Ed</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-reading-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><h3 class="field-label">Tags: </h3><ul class="links inline"><li class="taxonomy-term-reference-0"><a href="/readings/moocs" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">MOOCs</a></li></ul></div>Sun, 16 Sep 2012 23:04:19 +0000piperadmin86 at http://edf.stanford.eduhttp://edf.stanford.edu/readings/gates-moocs-and-remediation#commentsEd Tech Maphttp://edf.stanford.edu/readings/ed-tech-map
<div class="field field-name-field-article-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2012-09-14T00:00:00-07:00">09/14/2012</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>NewSchools is pleased to share this K-12 education technology market map with the entrepreneurial, philanthropic, and education communities. This tool provides a visual representation of ventures currently operating in the education technology market. Funded by the <a href="http://arnoldfoundation.org/" target="_blank">Laura and John Arnold Foundation</a>, NewSchools collaborated with leading experts Michael Horn (<a href="http://www.innosightinstitute.org/" target="_blank">Innosight Institute</a>) and Anthony Kim (<a href="http://www.edelements.com/">Education Elements</a>) to develop the map.</p>
<p><strong>Click on the image below to launch the interactive map:</strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.newschools.org/misc/edtechmap/" target="_blank" title="EdTech Market Map"><img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-5459" height="402" src="http://www.newschools.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/ed_tech_market_map.jpg" title="EdTech Market Map" width="438" /></a></p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source field-type-link-field field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="http://www.newschools.org/entrepreneurs/edtechmap" target="_blank">Originally posted on NewSchools</a></div></div></div>Sat, 15 Sep 2012 03:14:11 +0000piperadmin81 at http://edf.stanford.eduhttp://edf.stanford.edu/readings/ed-tech-map#commentsStanford launches Class2Go, an open-source platform for online classeshttp://edf.stanford.edu/readings/stanford-launches-class2go-open-source-platform-online-classes
<div class="field field-name-field-article-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2012-09-12T00:00:00-07:00">09/12/2012</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>The newest member of the family of platforms hosting online university courses was formally presented in society last week. Its name is <a href="http://class2go.stanford.edu">Class2Go</a>, and its proud parents are a team of eight engineers at Stanford's Computer Science Department.</p>
<p>Class2Go stands out for a variety of reasons. It is open-source, it is nonprofit, it is portable and it is designed not only for teaching but also for research, so Stanford professors will be able to learn about learning as they teach.</p>
<p>Two of the <a href="http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/september/online-courses-fall-090712.html">16 free online classes</a> offered by Stanford this fall will be available on the Class2Go platform: "An Introduction to Computer Networks," taught by Nick McKeown, professor of electrical engineering and computer science and Philip Levis, associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering, and "Solar Cells, Fuel Cells and Batteries," taught by Bruce Clemens a professor in the Materials Science and Engineering. Several more online classes will be offered on Class2Go in winter and spring; early likely candidates include nanotechnology and a class at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Class2Go also is being used for portions of courses taught on-campus to Stanford students.</p>
<p>Class2Go was conceived in spring. Stanford already had a course-hosting platform called Courseware, which was developed by a team under the direction of John Mitchell, recently appointed to be Stanford's first <a href="http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/august/online-learning-office-083012.html">vice provost for online learning</a>. The plan was to develop a mobile add-on to Courseware (hence the Class2Go name). So some of the engineers worked on improving Courseware, while others worked on the new product. But by June, the engineers realized they had a problem: The client-side mobile add-on would meet some immediate needs but would not be a strong base to build on. They decided that it would be more productive to start from scratch and rebuild the whole thing.</p>
<p>According to Engineering Manager Sef Kloninger, three decisions were made at the start: They would get rid of Courseware, the new platform would have a back end (meaning professors could collect data and keep track of student use) and they would incorporate several existing tools into the new platform. These include Khan Academy's exercise framework, YouTube's video service and a discussion forum tool created by a local company called Piazza.</p>
<h3><strong>Space to experiment</strong></h3>
<p>"We are huge supporters of free, public online classes and we're eager to learn from our first experience," McKeown said. He and Levis said they opted to go with Class2Go rather than with, say, Coursera – which they both praised highly for doing so much for online learning in such a short time – because they liked the idea of a variety of platforms, some open and some closed.</p>
<p>"While we're all learning about all the different features and capabilities we need," said Levis, "this allows us space to experiment and explore. We do think that, in the long term, it's important that universities have the choice of free and open platforms in addition to commercial ones."</p>
<p>McKeown, a well-known entrepreneur in addition to being a professor, recently sold his networking startup, Nicira. He also recently received the Lifetime Contribution Award from the international Association of Computer Machinery.</p>
<p>The non-proprietary format of Class2Go means that course assets – videos, reading assignments, slides, tests, etc. – belong to the professor, not to the platform. In other words, professors will not be tied to Class2Go.</p>
<p>"We wanted to make it as non-sticky as possible," Kloninger said. "If you want to leave, that's OK. In that way, we're unique. That's big. So using Khan Academy is our attempt to make it movable. And we advocate that others do this as well. That's our pledge to our customers."</p>
<p>That, too, appealed to McKeown and Levis. "Ideally," said Levis, "we'd like a practical, low-effort way to make our class material available on any platform." Their <a href="https://class.stanford.edu/networking/Fall2012/preview/">computer networks</a> class starts on Oct. 8.</p>
<h3><strong>Open-source and nonprofit</strong></h3>
<p>So that's the portable part. The open-source part is equally important. It means the code is available for view as it is being developed and can be used by anyone capable of knowing what to do with it. It's a way of spreading knowledge and of attracting the best engineering talent. If a brilliant programmer is sitting at home watching Kloninger's team build Class2Go, she might want to join. She might even fix a bug. Of course, the competition might be doing that as well, but that's the price of living up to one's principles.</p>
<p>"I'm motivated by the technology, and because we have a great team," Kloninger said. "But I wouldn't be as excited if it were closed. This is a platform supporting education, so it shouldn't be about making a profit."</p>
<p>And then there's the back end, or the ability for professors to track student use. Class2Go exists to serve Stanford faculty. The data is theirs; they don't have to ask for it. Many professors venturing out into uncharted online waters might want to know, for example, if their tens of thousands of students are watching the videos in real time or speeded up, if they prefer email to forum postings, at what point they drop the course (if they do) and if they respond better to videos or to slides.</p>
<p>Dan McFarland, an associate professor of education who is teaching "Organizational Analysis," a massive open online course, or MOOC, cross-listed in Education and Sociology, is keenly interested in educational research. Class2Go was not available in early summer when he began preparing his course (which will be offered on Coursera in fall), but he said the possibility of conducting research as he taught was a strong incentive to use Class2Go in the future.</p>
<p>"It's really hard to get good conditions for educational research," McFarland said, "and the online class offers great conditions, really exciting potential for generating knowledge."</p>
<h3><strong>The long summer</strong></h3>
<p>As the summer weeks passed, Class2Go slowly came together. The team included three Stanford staff engineers, three graduate students and two undergraduates who received research funds for the summer. Each week (in software engineering parlance each cycle is called a sprint) brought new challenges as old bugs were fixed and new ones appeared.</p>
<p>How to guide users from one page to the next? How to ease email communication between professor and students? How to register for classes? How to integrate videos and discussion forums? How to indicate that an assignment is ready for students? How to make it look like what it is? How to do more than one thing at a time?</p>
<p>By Aug. 30, there was light at the end of the tunnel. The past sprint had been very productive, Kloninger reported. The landing pages were coming together, the authentication and registration flow had been straightened out, email had been worked out. A method for extracting frames from videos to help professors and students find their way through the videos had been devised, a nifty trick invented by one of the two undergraduates, Kelvin Do. In his honor it was called the Kelvinator.</p>
<p>Around 70 nasty bugs had been squashed, but – bugs being bugs – more had appeared. Everyone present at the weekly demonstration meeting – team members or not – should go after them, Kloninger said. "It's open season, so go in there, mess with it, and if you see something, let us know."</p>
<p>Labor Day weekend was no holiday for the engineers. The honor code was one of the remaining tasks; just a couple of weeks earlier it emerged that students had plagiarized assignments in Coursera classes, so Coursera and everyone else was rushing to include a page on which students pledge to play by the rules.</p>
<p>The long weekend also was a time for the professors to make sure their classes were ready for fall quarter. Clemens – one of whose TAs was a regular attendee at the team's weekly meetings to make sure the platform met Clemens' needs – explained why he had decided to go with Class2Go rather than with other options for his online class.</p>
<p>"We chose Class2Go because of the strong in-house assistance and expertise," said Clemens. He has taught "Solar Cells, Fuel Cells and Batteries" for several years to students ranging from sophomores to advanced graduate students, he said, and he realized that that variety necessitated a more flexible approach.</p>
<p>"The opportunity to offer the course in a flipped classroom," i.e., with students watching the lectures on video and spending their time in class on more interactive, creative activities, "gives the chance for different students to pace themselves differently." Also, he noted, Class2Go affords him the opportunity to broadcast the course to interested students around the world. His <a href="https://class.stanford.edu/solar/Fall2012/preview/">online class</a> also starts Oct. 8.</p>
<p>"This is a Stanford course," he said, "and it seems right to offer it on the Stanford platform."</p>
<h3><strong>Go no go</strong></h3>
<p>On Sept. 5, it was do or die. A tired but excited group of engineers gathered in the open meeting space in the Gates Computer Science Building to take stock of what they had. Should they launch the next day as planned?</p>
<p>Jane Manning, production manager for Stanford Online and a participant in the platform's development, gave the thumbs up. The day before, she reported, she had worked closely with university lawyers to get the website's terms of service worked out.</p>
<p>Yes, there were still some issues. Perhaps there might be a load problem at first, "but nothing we couldn't throw some more hardware at," Kloninger said. It didn't feel fast enough to some of the engineers – "it's not as snappy as we'd like" Manning said – but others said that, really, the longest wait was just a few seconds. There were little glitches here and there with browser compatibility, but nothing one couldn't work around.</p>
<p>Manning had written a user manual for professors; it meant going through every screen of the administrative interface, which was tedious, but it was an opportunity to double check and triple check everything. By meeting time, Kloninger said, there were just three urgent bugs remaining, and they could be dealt with in the coming hours.</p>
<p>Class2Go was ready, they agreed. It was a go.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source field-type-link-field field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/september/class2go-online-platform-091212.html" target="_blank">Stanford Report</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-reading-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><h3 class="field-label">Tags: </h3><ul class="links inline"><li class="taxonomy-term-reference-0"><a href="/readings/online-classes" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Online Classes</a></li></ul></div>Thu, 13 Sep 2012 16:21:29 +0000piperadmin56 at http://edf.stanford.eduhttp://edf.stanford.edu/readings/stanford-launches-class2go-open-source-platform-online-classes#commentsNew National School Speed Test hopes to help all K-12 students get effective digital learninghttp://edf.stanford.edu/readings/new-national-school-speed-test-hopes-help-all-k-12-students-get-effective-digital-learning
<div class="field field-name-field-article-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2012-09-13T00:00:00-07:00">09/13/2012</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>With 99 percent of the nation's K-12 schools hooked-up to the internet, you'd think online learning was an educational staple. Sadly, it's also estimated that some 80 percent of those connections can't provide the 100Mbps per 1,000 students bandwidth the State Education Technology Directors Association recommends. That's why NPO EducationSuperHigway has announced the National School Speed Test initiative, with the goal to take actual stock of the state of internet connections in our schools. The NSST hopes to measure the internet capabilities of every K-12 school, and identify those that are lagging behind. Educational staff and students can also help out by checking their own school's speeds on a dedicated website (linked below). The results of the NSST will be open to the institutions themselves, districts and state departments of education, enabling them to better plan upgrade strategies for the future.</p>
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/3NHeworzk6o" width="560"></iframe>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source field-type-link-field field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="http://www.engadget.com/2012/09/13/new-national-school-speed-test-hopes-to-help-all-k-12-students/" target="_blank">Article originally posted on Engadget.com</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-reading-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><h3 class="field-label">Tags: </h3><ul class="links inline"><li class="taxonomy-term-reference-0"><a href="/readings/networking" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Networking</a></li><li class="taxonomy-term-reference-1"><a href="/readings/k12" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">K12</a></li><li class="taxonomy-term-reference-2"><a href="/readings/education-superhighway" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Education SuperHighway</a></li></ul></div>Thu, 13 Sep 2012 15:17:28 +0000piperadmin54 at http://edf.stanford.eduhttp://edf.stanford.edu/readings/new-national-school-speed-test-hopes-help-all-k-12-students-get-effective-digital-learning#comments10 College Courses That Didn’t Exist 20 Years Agohttp://edf.stanford.edu/readings/10-college-courses-didn%E2%80%99t-exist-20-years-ago
<div class="field field-name-field-article-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2012-09-10T00:00:00-07:00">09/10/2012</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>Turns out, all those hours you spent in high school playing Halo 3 just might pay off — now that you can major in Video Games.</p>
<p>Twenty years ago, no one would have dreamed of a career in the gaming arts, not to mention a B.A. in data journalism or a credited course in holograms. But as we continue to surf this massive digital wave, these types of concentrations aren’t entirely out of the question. In fact, they’re thriving in universities around the world.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source field-type-link-field field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="http://mashable.com/2012/09/10/innovative-college-courses/" target="_blank">Check out our list of 10 college courses that didn’t exist 20 years ago. Would you get an A+?</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-reading-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><h3 class="field-label">Tags: </h3><ul class="links inline"><li class="taxonomy-term-reference-0"><a href="/readings/college" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">College</a></li></ul></div>Mon, 10 Sep 2012 16:15:43 +0000piperadmin51 at http://edf.stanford.eduhttp://edf.stanford.edu/readings/10-college-courses-didn%E2%80%99t-exist-20-years-ago#comments